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Thank you for your patience while we transitioned to our new catalog. Welcome to a new era for COMC.com! We are grateful for the outpouring of support we are receiving, and we appreciate feedback as we continue to work together, building our new catalog.

As we mentioned previously, the next few weeks will be a bit rocky with missing data, errors, and many opportunities for improvement. Everything submitted is for sale as usual, but items that are missing data are harder to browse/search. The current state of the site is “Card Show” mode. Just like when you go to a card show and browse tables and bins looking for those rare items and special deals, that’s a bit what shopping on COMC will be like for the near future while we rapidly build our database. We are optimistic about the speed at which you will see improvement, as our data increased by 10% in one day alone! Your contributions have been significant. You’ve made a big difference!

Ways To Make It Better

The best way to help populate data is still by playing The Challenges, as the data entered there is normalized. When you assign a team name like New York Yankees to a card, you’re essentially bucketing that card with all the other Yankees cards. Be on the look out for new challenges and prizes!

You can submit missing data or corrections for existing data for specific cards in your inventory or for sale on the site:

Go to the Inventory Manager in your Dashboard. When you find missing/incorrect data in your inventory, click the Edit link next to the item description:

When you find missing data in the Search Results, click on the item and, at the top of the page next to the description, click the Edit link:

From Edit (from your Search or Inventory), you will get a popup where you can enter data that is missing or needs correction:

Please keep in mind, edits you make to a card are not normalized, meaning if you enter the correction to Teams: “New York Yankees” or “yankees” or “new yyok yankz”, the system won’t bucket it with other Yankees cards. It is still very helpful to use the new Edit feature, as it flags the card as incorrect and lets us know your correction suggestion. It is just a less efficient process than playing the Challenges and will take more time to correct, as someone here will need to review each correction.

Please DO NOT USE the Report Error function, as that is used for reporting ID errors. These will go to the wrong team.

As we said previously, we won’t charge storage fees for the month of April. We expect to have player and team search functionality fully restored by the end of April. In May and June, we will be working on more advanced search functionality, such as the type of memorabilia.

Suggested List Price (SLP)

We were hoping to have the beta version of our pricing suggestions live today, but we ran out of time. We will release it soon and let you know more as it develops. Once our SLPs are live, contributors who earned at least 20K in Challenge points will receive free SLPs while it is in beta. In the meantime, we have turned on the “Going Rate” feature. This feature may help you price your cards by showing you how many like items are on the site and the range at which they are being priced. While we have previously had quite a few requests for this feature, we have hesitated to turn it on to prevent a race-to-the-bottom with pricing. We will be monitoring how this feature is being used, and if it remains good for the COMC ecosystem, we may choose to keep it enabled.

Going Rate Feature

The other way to receive helpful pricing information is to click Sales History to the right of the items in your inventory. This activates a popup which tells you the condition, how many are for sale, how many have sold and shipped, and at what price.

Sales History Feature

We hope you enjoy COMC while it’s in Card Show mode, and we will continue to let you know as things develop here. Please continue to contribute to the catalog and let us know what we can do to create the best collecting experience!

On August 1st 2012, we began transitioning from Check Out My Cards to COMC.com and running dual sites in parallel. It has been eight years since we began offering our unique service with Check Out My Cards, and it is with deep pride and a certain degree of sadness that we announce that, as of July 1st, 2013, the old site has been officially shut down and retired, and we will be fully committing to the new site and brand COMC.com.

It has been a tremendous journey that has brought together a team of over 50 unique Team members, close to 3000 sellers, and well over 50,000 buyers! As a tribute to where we have been as a company, we want to take a moment and relive a few of the crowning moments during the company’s time as Check Out My Cards.

Date

Event

Dec 21st, 2005

Check Out My LLC is founded

Aug 1st, 2007

Check Out My Cards launched at the 2007 Nationals

Sept 4th, 2007

Make an Offer function is launched. During January of the following year, the Counter Offer function is added.

April 9th, 2008

Check Out My Cards moves into a bigger warehouse

Nov 28th, 2008

Check Out My Cards has its first Black Friday sale

July 2nd, 2009

Check Out My Cards adds its one millionth item to the site. To commemorate, Tim buys the card from the user

Aug 23, 2009

Check Out My Cards partners with Blowout Cards

Mar 12th, 2010

First card valued over $1000 sold on site

May 14th 2010

First official port sale completed. On September 15th of the following year, the port sale offer system is added

Nov 24th, 2011

Check Out My Cards launches the wildly successful First Time Seller Coupon and Referral program

Dec 3rd, 2011

Check Out My Cards moves into its current warehouse

Aug 1st, 2012

Check Out My Cards transitions to COMC.com

July 1st, 2013

Check Out My Cards is retired

As we gaze across the path that brought us here, it feels right to also see where we stand in the present. Check Out My Cards laid the groundwork for everything that COMC has become and the switch to COMC has provided us with new tools and options that weren’t possible before. A short list would include:

Being able to filter search results

The Promotions Feature including the now frequently used Partial Port sale function

The Beckett Grading Service integration

The ability to expand into new collectibles such as comics and many yet to come.

Memories, like candles, light the pathway to the future. Or something corny like that.

Yesterday, the team at COMC allowed Check Out My Cards to finally retire. We would love to hear about your personal experiences with the old site and where we have been. Please feel free to use the Comments box below to fill us in, and help us celebrate the next step into COMC.com’s future. We’re still expanding the new site experience and we know our users always have a lot of great suggestions for changes and features. Keep letting us know what you’d like to see and we’ll keep listening and improving.

We at COMC are proud to announce the launch of a new service designed to handle your high end items: the Vault. You will access this new service through a new subdomain: http://vault.comc.com. As a separate site from COMC.com, it will have a few key distinguishing features to optimize the sale and purchase of collectibles of the highest value. Whereas COMC has historically found a sweet spot with items in the $1-$100 range, the Vault will really make it worth sending us $100+ items.

Why You Want To Use The Vault

Only 10% commission on all items sold

High quality 36x zoom scans of front and back of each item

Items may be showcased at some of the most prestigious shows in the country

Additional payment options (e.g. wire transfer)

It is the safe and easy way to buy and sell high end collectibles

What Sellers Need to Know:

When an item sells through the Vault, the seller may opt to receive 100% of the sale as COMC Store Credit or we can immediately cash it out for 90%! All items marked as Vault Eligible will receive 36x zoom scans of the front and back, making it even easier for buyers to know exactly what they are purchasing. The official launch of the service will be on July 31st, 2013 at the 2013 National Sports Collectors Convention. The exact date this subdomain will become active will be announced closer to launch.

To make your items Vault Eligible, simply use any of the following services

Items that used any of the above services after January 1st 2013 are already Vault Eligible.

You may list any Vault Eligible item on COMC, the Vault, or on both. Pricing on each site is independent of one another. In the near future, you will be able to see which items are Vault Eligible from your Inventory Manager.

Storage Fees

A fee of $0.01/day will be charged for items with an asking price of up to $1,000. For more expensive items, it will be $0.01 per additional $1,000 per day. This fee is in place to help offset the cost of insurance. Storage fees for the Vault will be charged daily similar to the way COMC storage fees are charged monthly.

Make Offer: Unlike COMC which requires 100% of the offer amount to be funded before making an offer, the Vault will only require an offer reserve of 5% of the original asking price in COMC Store Credit. It will be refunded if the offer is countered or rejected, just like COMC offers.

If a buyer does not pay for an item on which they have placed a down payment, half of the down payment will be passed along to the seller in COMC Store Credit as a restocking fee. For instance, if an item sells for $1000, the down payment would be $50. If the buyer doesn’t pay for the item, $25 would go to the seller and $25 goes to COMC as a restocking fee.

On COMC’s end, we will continue to provide the same excellent customer service. In the event that a buyer receives a Vault item and it is deemed unacceptable, the buyer will have 7 days to return the item. After the 7 day waiting period has expired, the funds will be available for the seller.

Exposure at Shows and Conventions

There is one more benefit to having items in the Vault for both buyers and sellers. Items in the Vault may be eligible to travel with COMC and be sold at some of the most prestigious card shows in the nation! For example, later this summer COMC will have a 100 sqft corporate booth at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago where we will feature showcases of items from the Vault. Even as your physical items are being viewed by some of the most discerning buyers, they will still be on the site and available for sale. In this way, your items will receive the most exposure and acclaim.

Now this is worthy of celebration!

We hope you are as excited as we are to finally see this new feature rolling out. We encourage you to begin sending Vault Eligible items in to us as soon as possible. All Vault Eligible items received by July 15th will be taken with us to the National Sports Collectors Convention at no additional cost to you! Be one of the first to have your best in show at the best of shows.

Stay tuned for a video interview with our CEO Tim Getsch about the Vault. Submit your questions in the comments below and they may be featured in the interview. As always, we want to know what you think and now is the time to tell us before the service goes live.

While developing the many major updates that we have discussed in recent posts, we have decided to make some additional much needed user experience improvements. Because of the scope of the changes, we felt that it would be best to take another couple weeks to test the site and polish off the changes before launching it to the public. This will be by far the largest single update we have ever made to the website, so we don’t want rush it or potentially sacrifice any quality.

We will continue to make performance improvements and bug fixes to Check Out My Cards in the meantime.

Sneak Peek @ the National

Those of you attending the National will have an opportunity to get a sneak peek of the new COMC.com. You can watch demos and test drive the new features. Please swing by and give us your feedback.

Based on the comments from the previous post, there is a lot of confusion about how our new “Three Strikes” feature works – partially due to what may have been an unclear explanation, as well as a bug that didn’t correctly ignore counteroffers. Everything is now working correctly, and we’d like to take another stab at explaining how it works.

The 3 strike system is simply a temporary black list of items on which a specific buyer must wait before sending another offer.

Think of it as a friendly reminder for buyers that send a very high amount of offers. Instead of repeatedly making an offer a seller has already rejected multiple times, we simply limit the number of times a buyer can get an offer rejected. You get 3 “strikes” for every 90 days for each item. If the item is sold to another seller, your strike count resets to 0.

Buyers and sellers don’t get strikes. Only items get strikes, and those strikes are specific to buyer/seller combinations. Sellers can get offers from hundreds of different buyers on the same item and reject all of them. When a specific buyer gets 3 offers rejected on the same item in the past 90 days, the buyer must wait before making another offer on that same item. We have removed all strikes on items predating May 23rd, so everyone will have a “clean slate” going in.

While this feature is more of a tool to help make offers more effective, we still encourage our users to utilize some etiquette when communicating offers. Some things we would ask user to consider regarding offers include:

Think of making an offer as walking into someone’s store or up to their table and asking them to sell you a card at a discount. How receptive would you be to your own offer?

Keep in mind we allow offers up to 50% off asking price. A “low-ball” offer should be seen as a starting point of negotiation, not as an insult.

If you and another user do not reach an agreed upon price for an item, please do not be offended. Just as in face-to-face negotiations, it happens.

We would also like to thank everyone for so actively contributing to our Blog discussions and Facebook pages. We’re proud to have one of the friendliest user bases around, who aren’t afraid to speak their minds and tell us how we’re doing. As the site grows and more users are frequenting these areas, we feel it is our responsibility to set up a few guidelines.

Things we cannot allow:

Any kind of personal attacks or “callouts” on other users (regardless of prior posts, personal grievances, etc.)

Linking to or promoting unaffiliated websites

Profanity, slurs, and inflammatory posts

Posting personal information (someone else’s or your own)

Posts not abiding by the guidelines we’ve set will be deleted, and anyone who repeatedly ignores them may find they are unfortunately no longer able to contribute to these pages.

Again, we would like to thank each and every one of you for making this community the amazing place it is. We at COMC want to be proactive in our responsibilities to help keep it that way

I finally set aside some time to make improvements to the site. Here are some of the things I was able to get done this weekend.

Performance Improvements
Now that we have been getting a lot more data, there have been some noticeable slowdowns on certain parts of the site. Here are some areas where we improved performance this weekend.

Home page average render time was about 3 seconds, now the average is 0.03 seconds

This 100x performance improvement was achieved by using a technique called Partial-Page Output Caching. We couldn’t use the simple output caching because we display the number of items in your shopping cart, and this always needs to be calculated.

Search page render time was commonly 3-10 seconds, now it is almost always less than 1 second

Quantity Manufactured now displayed in the search results
You no longer need to dig into the card details page to see if a card is serial numbered. The quantity manufactured is now tacked on to the end of the description. Also, you can choose to sort the search results by the quantity manufactured.

Sort by Quantity Manufactured

More Meaningful Sorting by High Book Value
Cards that are listed in Beckett but do not have a book price are now mixed in with the rest of the cards when sorting by highest book value.

We have been getting more and more cards that have very low serial numbers and do not have a price listed in Beckett. The previous default sort order would put all of these at the top, and this kept burying the legitimately high priced cards further and further down. Now we try to weave in the un-priced cards approximately where they might be if they had a book value.

Here is a screen shot of one of the many places we use this technique in the inventory tracking system we use for managing the data behind CheckOutMyCards.com.

As a front-end development tool, Microsoft Access provides an incredible balance of power and rapid development that allows us to move quickly with changing demands. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is currently our back-end database for both our in house inventory management system and our ASP.net web site.